The blood of Emmett Till

Timothy B. Tyson

In 2014, protesters ringed the White House, chanting, "How many black kids will you kill? Michael Brown, Emmett Till!" Why did demonstrators invoke the name of a black boy murdered six decades before? In 1955, white men in the Mississippi Delta lynched a fourteen-year-old from Chicago named Emmett Till. His murder was part of a wave of white terrorism in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. The national coalition organized to protest the Till lynching became the foundation of the modern civil rights movement. Only weeks later, Rosa Parks thought about young Emmett as she refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Five years later, the Emmett Till generation, forever marked by the vicious killing of a boy their own age, launched sit-in campaigns that turned the struggle into a mass movement. "I can...